UK air traffic control outage caused by software defect, says operator
NATS said the glitch hit a flight data system used to identify aircraft, and a preliminary report said one millisecond could have avoided the failure.
- On Friday, the National Air Traffic Services revealed a software defect in its flight data system caused the September 8 outage, grounding more than 2,000 flights and affecting 300,000 passengers across UK airports.
- The flaw occurred when a manual request for an aircraft identification code was paused for a higher-priority task, causing corrupted data 'in the space of a millisecond,' Nats said.
- Stranded passenger Addie Kitson, 26, faced almost £100 in unexpected costs after her flight was diverted to Stockholm, spending 19 hours at the airport.
- Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander described the disruption as 'completely unacceptable,' ordering the Civil Aviation Authority to launch an independent review due within six months.
- Nats CEO Martin Rolfe apologized to affected passengers, stating "it's our job to get people where they want to go, quickly and without delay," as a permanent software fix is safety tested and deployed.
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The British National Air Traffic Control Service (NATS) stated on Friday that the airport malfunction had occurred earlier in September due to a software error (MS) in the system, rather than external interference.
2,000 UK flight cancellations caused by ‘previously unknown defect’ that happened in the ‘space of a millisecond’ — travel chaos took days to fix and left hundreds of thousands stranded
A report from Nats found that the disruption stemmed from a manual request for a squawk code that was corrupted during processing.
NATS, a company responsible for the control of British air traffic, reported on Friday (18) that an interruption that affected hundreds of thousands of passengers last week was caused by a software failure. NATS's director-president, Martin Rolfe, said that the paralysis was not related to a problem that occurred in 2023, which also caused widespread disruptions, nor a military intervention, as reported by some communications vehicles last week.…
UK air traffic control outage caused by ‘software defect’
he UK air traffic control outage that affected hundreds of thousands of passengers last week was caused by a software defect, the boss of system operator NATS said on Friday, as he defied airlines’ calls for his resignation over the latest in a series of incidents. The outage led to 2,000 flight cancellations and days […]
Report released this Friday attributed the problems at British airports to security measures applied following a software error — which forced the cancellation of 2,000 flights.
This was a software failure in a specific part of our flight data system, whose origin we identified in a small subsection of the code, said responsible for the national air traffic service
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